The Hectic phase

The pressure to complete all the work before the deadline was mounting everyday. Me and my colleague used to leave Pali's place at around 8:30 and reach the office in 5 minutes' time. Everynight, after dinner, we had to tell Kusum the time at which we wanted a taxi, the next morning. She would book the taxi for us and give us a slip that had the message "7 Euros fixed price, [The office address], Thanks, Perera" in German. We had to show this slip to the taxi driver and then he would nod and take us to the office.

Language is a big problem here. Not everybody can understand English. If they understand by chance and respond back, we can not understand German. But it is fun. After paying the money to the driver and taking the 'quittung' [bill] we would start the work in the lab.

Our in-charge person at the customer's office [ I'll call him as stinky from now on], would come in at around at 10, shake hands and show his all yellow-orange teeth and say 'Good morning'. He would at times sit with us and explain how the system worked or would tell us that he would be back in sometime and leave the lab. Trust me, he wore the same white sweat-shirt and the black jeans for 5 days in a row! [now you know why I call him so].

He definitely needs to consult Dr.Bhatwadekar [the Orbit white chewing gum ad on the TV!!]. I will not be surprised if for some reason stinky had got a cow teeth transplant done. The smell, my god! it was horrible. Added to this, if we asked him a question, he would pull a chair and sit next to me so close that I could kiss him. Now, let me tell you one thing, I'M STRAIGHT and I CAN NOT AND WILL NEVER DO SUCH THINGS. I just wanted you to know how close stinky would come when sitting on a chair and I had to either breathe through my mouth or hold my breath and die.

For some reason, I have had a smelly experience in my company since I joined this account. My manager in India is stinky's close relative. [another post for all of you to smell them] We had to work till about 8 in the evening after which a security guy would come and ask the employees to leave! How I wish if this could happen in Bangalore. Too much to ask for? I don't think so..

Pali would pick us up and me and my colleague had to again boot our laptops and start the documentation update as we would not have got the license to use that tool while we were in office. All this would amount to 12 hours of work everyday! It has been really long since I worked so much in a day.

This hectic phase of work went on for the next 5 days until we had our first weekend in Germany. Another post for the weekend.